Add other render engine

[willDTF]

the arnold integration is great, but it could be interesting to have some other major render engines, as renderman

best

[frenchdog]

Definitely possible.

However since we use only Arnold at Rodeo, we won't work on that any time soon.
If you want to add support for an other renderer procedural, it should be "relatively" easy since the design of the Walter procedural is plugin based (arnold being the only plugin right now).
If you look in arnold/procedural/engine.h you will see that it is using a render delegate. The Arnold API is called only in arnold/procedural/plugin.cpp.

Of course we should slightly re-organize the procedural (having a procedural/arnold, procedural/prman, etc... directory structure, with CMakelists.txt files generating both dso's).

On the Maya side, something similar to the 'maya/mtoa' and 'maya/walterMtoAConnection` would be needed for other renderers too.

In Katana the Walter_In node generating the scene graph should work "almost as is" with an other renderer... I'm sure there are a couple of Arnold specific attributes that are created by this node :).

Finally for Houdini, you will need to create a new HDA working with your renderer.

Hope it will give you a better idea of the amount of work!

Cheers

[willDTF]

hi, sound too complex for me at the moment
i keep the idea for later ;) thanks for the answer